Gilded Gates
November 1, 2005
America’s first known gated community for the affluent, Llewellyn Park, was built in 1853 in West Orange, N.J., as a private hideaway: grand estates protected behind iron gates. More than 150 years later, the gated community has been democratized. There are upward of 20,000 gated communities and more than 16 million Americans residing in them. They range from gated RV parks to gated luxury communities where you cannot edge past the front gate for less than $5 million. There are gated communities comprising just a few homes, like the 14-home Maluhia in Maui, or entire master-planned cities hiding behind gates, like Del Webb’s Anthem, Ariz., where you can visit shops, golf courses, schools and churches without venturing into the outside world. All incarnations of the gated community lure those looking for what Richard Gollis, principal with the real estate advisory firm the Concord Group, calls “a lock-and-go, low-maintenance lifestyle.”
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A showhouse built in 2004 ($6.6 million) at the Twin Eagles
community near Naples, Fla. (Click image to enlarge.)
But some say the gated, or “secured,” community—defined by the American
Housing Survey as a residential community “in which public access by
nonresidents is restricted, usually by physical boundaries such as gates, walls
and fences, and through private security”—chips away at civic life and caters to
fear. As developers alter their creations to appease the market and local
municipalities, there may be a gated community for every kind of American or, in
the future, there may be no gates at all.
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A model home ($5.1 million) at the Twin
Eagles community near Naples, Fla. (Click image to
enlarge.) In the mid-20th century, gated communities blossomed. The first retirement community, Youngtown in Arizona, opened its gates in 1954, followed by an explosion in the 1960s and ’70s of golf course communities, such as Leisure World in Mesa, Ariz. In the 1980s, as baby boomers were buying homes in droves, developers began to enclose middle-class subdivisions, as well. These developments grew mostly in the Sunbelt states, where people were retiring or purchasing vacation homes.
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